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David O. Russell: In Conversation

David Russell, the director of “American Hustle.”Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

You could argue that, with his new film, “American Hustle,” coming on the heels of “The Fighter” and “Silver Linings Playbook,” David O. Russell has put together the best trifecta of any active American filmmaker. “The Fighter” earned seven Oscar nominations; “Silver Linings” received eight; and “American Hustle” was just named the year’s best film by the New York Film Critics Circle. Early in his career, Russell developed a reputation as a brilliant but difficult director; George Clooney said the two actually came to blows on the set of Russell’s third film, “Three Kings,” and later a YouTube video circulated of Lily Tomlin and Russell in a full-throated, expletive-laced shouting match on the set of his fourth film, “I Heart Huckabees.” Whether­ the characterization was fair, Russell has since undergone a personal, artistic and, ultimately, professional transformation. He regards “Hustle,” a highly fictionalized version of the Abscam scandal of the late ’70s and early ’80s, as the third in a loose trilogy of films about ordinary people trying to live passionate lives. It’s a journey he has had some experience with firsthand.

Neal Gabler: “American Hustle” is your third film in the last four years. There were six years between “I Heart Huckabees” in 2004 and “The Fighter” in 2010, during which you didn’t release a single picture. What happened?

David O. Russell: A lot of things happened. I was very humbled. But that was good. Humbled in the sense that I had gotten divorced and I was helping to raise a son who faces bipolar issues. But I had also lost my way in terms of what kind of movie did I want to make. I knew the feelings I wanted to put in “Huckabees.” But you’re trying to make a kind of movie that you’ve never made before, and maybe it’s not your kind of movie, and maybe it leans too much on ideas. With “The Fighter,” I was at a place where I was ready to know where my heart and mind were going to be invested. And it became those people. I love these people — the details of these people who live in these ways that are very rich. To me, it was about the world of these people, how they felt and how they talked to each other. They are always in a predicament at the beginning where they’re at a place they don’t want to be, and they spend the whole movie reckoning how to get through, and if they want to get through, if life is worth living, and if they cannot only survive but feel a passion for life. It’s the enchantment of lives. I really don’t want to make a film that doesn’t have that enchantment in it.

N.G.: Your last three films have been very emotion-rich, which is different from your first four films — “Spanking the Monkey,”“Flirting With Disaster,”“Three Kings” and “I Heart Huckabees” — which were very idiosyncratic.

D.R.: I feel like I have a direction that’s very clear to me now. I have a great love and a feeling for a particular kind of character and story, which I don’t think I ever could have said earlier of my first four films. It started with “The Fighter.” I had written “Silver Linings Playbook” before that, but I didn’t have the chance to make it. After “The Fighter,” I got a chance to make it, and it became a companion volume. If I had leaned a little bit more on the fabric of the emotion, I think “Huckabees” would feel more like these last three films.

Photo

Russell on the set of “Three Kings” (1999), with George Clooney.Credit
Everett Collection

N.G.: What you’re describing sounds like a kind of artistic revelation.

D.R.: I had overthought certain films so much that I walked away from a couple of them. When I made “The Fighter,” I said to myself, “Mr. Overthinking Things, how about really, really just do it as good as you can from your heart. Can you do that? Well, actually just try to do that. That would be an achievement.” For whatever reason, I came to appreciate and respect the honor and privilege of telling such human stories. The emotion is what I want.

N.G.: You are not exactly the first director anyone would have thought of for “The Fighter.” You were known for black comedies.

D.R.: I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mark Wahlberg. We’ve made three films together. He was having a great period of success, and I was having a period of changing my life and not knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t being as successful, and it wasn’t as easy for me to get a film made. He could tell from speaking to me that I had a great feel for the family thing between Dicky and his mother. And he knew how hungry I was.

N.G.: How did you come to “American Hustle”?

D.R.: When I was working on “Silver Linings,” my old producer from “Three Kings,” Charles Roven, and Richard Suckle, who works with him, had been showing me this story that Eric [Singer] had written. And I immediately thought, Wow, look at these people. I knew I was in the ballpark of these people. The characters and the places had, to me, all the richness that I’ve done, but on a bigger stage. And I rubbed my hands together in anticipation over which actors I could approach to play characters that they’ve never played before.

N.G.: Just as you weren’t the first director to come to mind for a boxing picture, Christian Bale in “Hustle” is not the first actor you think of to play an overweight Jewish con artist from the Bronx.

D.R.: I knew Christian would not be able to resist this person. I went from the office of Roven and Suckle right to Bale’s house, and we would sit in his backyard, and our kids would play together, and we would talk about what we thought was really, really human and passionate [in the material] that interested us the most. And for us, it isn’t simply about the con games. What’s interesting to me is that every day is a kind of narrative — every day is a belief of how you embrace and live and enjoy your life or suffer with your life. I believe that every movie in a way is about narrative: What narrative is the character telling himself? Christian and I loved that this man was an artist, constructing his identity, not just at a superficial level but at a soul level. We would talk about him as a director of a theater company — as a director of his own life.

N.G.: Did you meet Melvin Weinberg, whom the character is loosely based on?

D.R.: Yes. But by then I kind of had my point of view, and we tried not to draw too much on the real person as much as on what we created. But Christian picked up an enormous amount. His whole posture changed. His whole being changed. He completely transformed the way he moved. He became three inches shorter. He sank into here [slinks down], which resulted in herniating a disc. He lost his neck. He gained 50 pounds. I said, “God, take it easy!”

N.G.: This gets back to the notion that your movies are now generated by particulars and details rather than ideas. Or rather, that ideas arise from the particulars. You obviously loved the world of “American Hustle.”

D.R.: Worlds are everything to me. When I would see my Bronx relatives or my Brooklyn relatives — we would visit them from Mamaroneck — I’d be on the outside of it, whether it was a bar mitzvah or a Catholic confirmation. My parents had renounced both their traditions. So I’d watch these events from the outside with great fascination. I said, “They had a ‘thing.’ They’re inside of a ‘thing.’ ” Some of my relatives in the outer boroughs became my greatest resource — because their worlds were so specific — and I now say, “This is magic.” Those people are living life so passionately. They’re living something real.

N.G.: Most filmmakers talk about how they were weaned on movies. You don’t seem to have been a movie geek from birth.

D.R.: I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, because of our home, because of my dad. My dad was a C.C.N.Y. student who worked at Simon & Schuster in the stockroom and then became a salesman — his whole life was at Simon & Schuster. My mom was a Brooklyn girl from Queens College who worked as a secretary there. When we moved to the suburbs, there were books everywhere. I started a newspaper in high school, and I always wrote short stories. As a young man, I never thought I would be a filmmaker. I came out of college [Amherst], and I did community work in Boston’s South End, and I also went to Central America, where I was teaching English and writing. But I was really conflicted about what I wanted to do. I burned out on community organizing, and I said, “I think I’m going to try to make films.”

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D.R.: What saved my life was Duke Ellington and Hal Ashby and Frank Capra and all these films that I watched. That was my sustenance. But at a certain point, the thing that they were sustaining [community organizing] was no longer sustaining me. I said: “Well, dare I say it? Could this actually become my work? But I don’t know how to do this.” And the way I taught myself cinema was by memorizing a 20-minute section of “Chinatown,” just as I’d memorized entire sections of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I took a piece of a movie I loved, and I would memorize it. That, and by becoming a production assistant on a PBS series called “Smithsonian World.”

N.G.: The story is that you wrote your first film, “Spanking the Monkey,” while on jury duty.

D.R.: That’s true. But by then I had made two short films and gotten grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. And I was very fortunate to be riding the wave of the indie vogue.

N.G.: And you eventually went from indie filmmaking to a studio picture, “Three Kings,” about soldiers in Iraq.

D.R.: I thought I’d like to make a big picture that’s on a big canvas that shows my interest in worlds of terrible conflict, emotionally and spiritually, about life and politics.

N.G.: And that’s when you got the reputation of being difficult with actors, which is somewhat odd given that actors in your last two films have won three Oscars.

D.R.: When you find a silver lining, you turn a liability into a strength — even if you think those things weren’t particularly warranted. If you look at the number of actors that I’ve worked with, it’s not a truth. Lily Tomlin and I love each other, and we would work together tomorrow. George [Clooney] and I had a friendly rapport last year. I don’t know if we would be working together. I don’t think we would rule it out. But the point is, much ado was made about things long passed.

N.G.: How much is due to your unconventional directing style?

D.R.: On a movie set they have this thing they call the “video village,” where they have the monitors. I don’t ever go to the “video village.” I have to move the camera fluidly as if it’s a person in the room. And the camera is with me. I’m next to the camera. It took a lot of trouble to find a monitor that I could hold in my hand that would be reliable. It’s heavy. But it works. I carry it. I then walk in with the actors and the camera, and you’re in the scene, and you let them run, and you don’t call, “Cut,” and sometimes you call lines out, and sometimes you have to know when to shut up and let them go. Sometimes while the camera is rolling, you’ll pull someone over and whisper in their ear. I’ll say: “He lied to you. Screw him. Tell him. He broke your heart.” There are those moments, as if a band is playing, where you feel you can throw in some notes.

N.G.: How much of the acting is improvisation?

D.R.: I’d say it’s three-quarters known and one-quarter improvisation. It’s a zone of looseness or immediacy. That’s what De Niro called it. We don’t do what De Niro on “Silver Linings” called “bedroom perfect,” meaning, “This was perfect when I was in my hotel room.” What I’m basically saying to the actors is, “That’s wonderful, but we’re going to forget about that now, and who knows what’s going to happen?”

D.R.: You don’t have a lot of time, because these schedules are very short. “The Fighter” was 33 days. “Silver Linings” was 33 days. And “American Hustle,” which arguably is twice as big a canvas, was only 41 days. But when someone is hanging off a cliff, you play it like you really mean it.

N.G.: One of the things you’re known for is the way you find comedy in drama and drama in comedy. Or, put another way, how you find both the silver lining and the cloud — and make them seem inseparable.

D.R.: The whole time I was making “The Fighter,” we would shoot in Lowell, Mass., and everybody around Lowell regards it as an ominous place. It seemed like a shadowy Pottersville [the hellish town in “It’s a Wonderful Life”]. And I came to love it. On the weekends, I would go lie on the lawn at Andover, which is close by. I would lie looking at the big World War I monument they have, and I would say, “Here I am in Bedford Falls.” And then I’d go back to Pottersville. But to me, Bedford Falls is in Pottersville and Pottersville is in Bedford Falls. Like Capra, I find both realities present in the same souls of the same people in the same place, and the one that manifests depends on their hopes and dispositions. As Pat says in “Silver Linings,” when his father asks what “Excelsior” means: “It means I’m going to take all this negativity and use it as fuel.”

N.G.: One idea in “Hustle” is that people are willing to suspend their disbelief — that they want to be hustled. It is the way they get through life.

D.R.: In “Hustle,” Irving the con man says, “As far as I could tell, people were conning each other all the time to get what they wanted,” meaning life is such a tricky process. We talk ourselves into things. Indeed, you can say from childbirth, it’s a necessary component of the software of humanity. You must leave out the painful parts, or you would never do certain things. You would never get married or have a child or embrace this perilous luge course. As Pat says at the end of “Silver Linings”: “The world will break your heart 10 ways to Sunday. That’s guaranteed. . . . But what I can say is that Sunday is my favorite day again.”

N.G.: In some ways, you are making genre films — a boxing movie, a romantic comedy, a con picture — that don’t feel like genre films.

D.R.: Nothing is really a cliché when you really, really do it from the heart. And if you really feel it, and it’s real, and you know people who have felt it, there is nothing clichéd about it. It will bring you to your knees. It will make you cry. And that’s my job: To tell those stories in ways that surprise us and remind us of the opera that we’re living with every mistake and every new chance.

Correction: January 5, 2014

Because of a transcription error, an interview on Dec. 15 with David O. Russell about his new film, “American Hustle,” misquoted him. He said, “You must leave out the painful parts, or you would never do certain things” — not “live out” the painful parts.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2013, on Page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Mr. Overthinking Things, How About Really, Really Just Do It as Good as You Can From Your Heart. Can You Do That?’. Today's Paper|Subscribe